英语高级视听说unit 4

1、英语高级视听说unit 4 unit 4 brain man almost 25 years ago, 60 minutes introduced viewers to george finn, whose talent was immortalized in the movie man.george has a condition known as savant syndrome, a mysterious disorder of the brain where someone has a spectacular skill, even genius, in a mind that is o

2、therwise extremely limited. morley safer met another savant, daniel tammet, who is called most savants, he has no obvious mental disability, and most important to scientists, he can describe his own thought process. he may very well be a scientific rosetta stone, a key to understanding the brain. _

3、back in 1983, george finn, blessed or obsessed with calendar calculation, could give you the day if you gave him the date. george finn is a savant. in more politically incorrect times he would have been called an savantbrilliance. asked if he knew how he does it, finn told safer, can do that. if thi

4、s all seems familiar, there?s a reason: five years after the 60 minutes broadcast, dustin hoffman immortalized savants like george in the movie which brings us to that other savant we mentioned: daniel tammet. he is an englishman, who is a 27-year-old math and memory wizard. thats a prime number. 19

5、31. and you were born on a sunday. and this year, your birthday will be on a wednesday. and youll be 75, it is estimated there are only 50 true savants living in the world today, and yet none are like daniel. he is articulate, self-sufficient, blessed with all of the spectacular ability of a savant,

6、 but with very little of the disability. take his math skill, for example. asked to multiply 31 by 31 by 31 by 31, tammet quickly - and accurately - responded with and it?s not just calculating. his gift of memory is stunning. briefly show him a long numerical sequence and he?ll recite it right back

7、 to you. and he can do it backwards, to boot. that feat is just a warm-up for daniel tammet. he first made headlines at oxford, when he publicly recited the endless sequence of numbers embodied by the greek letter pi, the numbers we use to calculate the dimensions of a circle, are usually rounded of

8、f to 3.14. but its numbers actually go on to infinity. daniel studied the sequence - a thousand numbers to a page. time, it took him several weeks to prepare and then daniel headed to oxford, where with number crunchers checking every digit, he opened the floodgates of his extraordinary memory. tamm

9、et says he was able to recite, in a proper order, 22,514 numbers. it took him over five hours and he did it without a single mistake. scientists say a memory feat like this is truly extraordinary. dr. v.s. ramachandran and his team at the california center for brain study tested daniel extensively a

10、fter his pi achievement. what did he make of him? introspect on his own-abilities, and while that introspection is extremely rare among savants, daniel?s ability to describe how his mind works could be invaluable to scientists studying the brain, our least understood organ. jelly in your brain doing

11、 that computation? we dont know that, it may seem to defy logic, but ramachandran believes that a savant?s genius could actually result from brain injury. possibility is that many other parts of the brain are functioning abnormally or sub-normally. and this allows the patient to allocate all his att

12、entional resources to the one remaining part,he explains. theres a lot of clinical evidence for this. some patients have a stroke and suddenly, their artistic skills improve. that theory fits well with daniel. at the age of four, he suffered a massive epileptic seizure. he believes that seizure cont

13、ributed to his condition. numbers were no longer simply numbers and he had developed a rare crossing of the senses known as synesthesia. sequence forms landscapes in my mind,10,000, i can visualize in this way, has its own color, has its own shape, has its own texture. for example, when daniel says

14、he sees pi, he does those instant computations, he is not calculating, but says the answer simply appears to him as a landscape of colorful shapes. life, asked if they?re beautiful, tammet says, number. i dont like it very much. whereas 333, for example, is beautiful to me. its round. its?. its-yes.

15、 its chubby, tammet agrees. yet even with the development of these extraordinary abilities as a child, nobody sensed that daniel was a prodigy, including his mother, jennifer. but he was different. was constantly counting things,jennifer remembers. think, what first attracted him to books, was the a

16、ctual numbers on each page. and he just loved counting. asked if she thinks there?s a connection between his epilepsy and his rare talent, she tells safer, im not sure that its entirely that, but i think it might have escalated it. daniel was also diagnosed with asperger?s syndrome-a mild form of au

17、tism. it made for a painful childhood. tammet remembers. to me, and tease me about them. and i would put my fingers in my ears and count very quickly in powers of two. two, four, eigl he now runs his own online educational business. he and his partner neil try to keep a low profile, despite his grow

18、ing fame. yet the limits of his autism are always there. there are lots of people around me. if theres lots of noise, i put my fingers in my ears to block it out, he says. that anxiety keeps him close to home. he can?t drive, rarely goes shopping, and finds the beach a difficult place because of his

19、 compulsion to count the grains of sand. and it manifests itself in other ways, like making a very precise measurement of his cereal each morning: it must be exactly 45 grams of porridge, no more, no less. daniel was recently profiled in a british documentary called ?brainman.? the producers posed a

20、 challenge that he could not pass up: learn a foreign language in a week - and not just any foreign language, but icelandic, considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. in iceland, he studied and practiced with a tutor. when the moment of truth came and he appeared on tv live with

21、 a host, the host said, was amazed. he was responding to our questions. he did understand them very well and i thought that his grammar was very good. we are very proud of our language and that someone is able to speak it after only one week, that?s just great. the brain? often leads to a completely

22、 new direction of research,provide the golden key. doesnt always happen. sometimes its just mumbo-jumbo. but that may well be true with savants. daniel continues to volunteer for scientists who want to understand his amazing brain. but he is reluctant to become what he calls ?a performing seal? and has refused most offers to cash in on his remarkable skills. to come up with some great discovery,that i can do at everything. but he has written a book ab